A name can be an omen, a map, a destiny. Dante Remus Lăzărescu. It’s a name that evokes the mythical founding of a civilization and its greatest poet of the afterlife. The director Cristi Puiu, the master architect of the Romanian New Wave, chooses nothing by chance. Encapsulated in this name is the epic in reverse we are about to witness: not the foundation of a city, but the dissolution of a man; not a visionary journey through the realms beyond, but a terribly terrestrial descent into the circles of a bureaucratic and medical hell. "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" is a hospital-bound Divine Comedy, an odyssey by ambulance through the Bucharest night that reveals itself to be one of the most ruthless and lucid cinematic autopsies of the human condition.

Mr. Lăzărescu is a 63-year-old widower who lives alone with his cats in a modest apartment. He feels unwell. A persistent headache, stomach pains. Thus begins an ordeal that unfolds in near-real time for two and a half hours, an existential long take that glues us to this man’s stretcher as he is shuttled from one hospital to another. Puiu adopts a style of almost documentary verismo, something akin to surveillance-camera cinema. His nervous, omnipresent handheld camera is not a stylistic quirk à la Dogma 95; it is a moral instrument. It denies us a safe distance, making us uncomfortable witnesses, almost accomplices, in the slow and methodical dismantling of a person. There is no musical score to manipulate our emotions, only the wail of sirens, the beeping of medical equipment, and a ceaseless torrent of overlapping, trivial, exasperated dialogue.

The Dantesque analogy is the keystone to deciphering the work. Lăzărescu is our Dante, a soul lost in the dark wood of illness and old age. His guide in this mobile purgatory is Mioara (an extraordinary Luminița Gheorghiu), the ambulance paramedic. She is no transfigured Beatrice, but a far more prosaic and earthly Virgil: tired, cynical, at times brusque, but the only one to retain a glimmer of stubborn compassion. It is she who fights, argues, insists, reminding the doctors that the person on the stretcher is not a "clinical case" or "the old drunk," but "Mr. Lăzărescu." Each hospital that refuses him admission is a new circle, populated by a host of indifferent doctors, overworked nurses, and bureaucrats slumbering in their petty kingdoms of power. Their sins are not the cardinal ones of tradition, but those, perhaps more frightening, of modernity: apathy, professional burnout, procedural dehumanization.

The film, however, transcends a simple critique of the post-Ceaușescu Romanian health system, even as it offers a merciless portrait of it. It becomes a Kafkaesque exploration of the individual versus the System. Like Josef K. in "The Trial," Lăzărescu is accused of a crime he does not know—his own infirmity, his fragility, his very existence—and is judged by an invisible tribunal whose laws are incomprehensible and arbitrary. His progressive loss of lucidity and speech is the perfect metaphor for his depersonalization. At the beginning, he is a man with a history, nosy neighbors, grievances. By the end, after hours of waiting, hasty diagnoses, and humiliation, he is reduced to a nearly inert body, an object to be operated on, a file to be closed. His identity is eroded question by question, form by form. "Have you been drinking?" they all ask, with a prejudice that becomes a verdict before a diagnosis is even reached. The perforated ulcer that is killing him is less important than the alcohol on his breath.

The script by Puiu and Răzvan Rădulescu is a masterpiece of naturalism infused with a jet-black humor rooted in the theater of the absurd of Ionesco. The doctors' conversations do not revolve around the patient's health but around personal squabbles, gossip, career problems. In one memorable scene, two doctors argue heatedly about an online purchase while Lăzărescu moans in pain a few feet away. This isn't active cruelty, but something perhaps worse: a total indifference, the banality of evil applied to the emergency room. The horror is not born of an exceptional event, but from the normality of a system that has collapsed in on itself, where humanity has become a luxury no one can afford anymore.

This film is the founding manifesto of what would come to be celebrated as the Romanian New Wave, a movement characterized by long sequence shots, an austere aesthetic, and a visceral focus on the moral cracks of contemporary society. In a sense, films like this and Cristian Mungiu’s subsequent "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" are a direct reaction to decades of propaganda cinema from the communist regime. Against state-sponsored fiction, Puiu and his colleagues pit a brutal, uncomfortable, unadorned truth. The camera does not lie, does not judge; it merely observes. And what it observes is a nation still trapped in the rubble of its past, whose citizens have learned to survive by developing a shell of cynicism and disillusionment.

Lăzărescu's journey can also be read as a broader parable on mortality itself. It is a radical demystification of the "good death." Dying, here, is not a tragic or heroic act. It is a bureaucratic process, a logistical nuisance. It is to be stripped, literally and metaphorically, of everything that defines us, until all that remains is aching flesh on an operating table, under neon lights that erase all shadow and all mystery. The final, almost silent, part of the film is devastatingly powerful. Lăzărescu can no longer speak. The doctors talk about him, over him, as if he weren't there. They shave his head, preparing him for a surgery that may be for nothing. His final glance at the camera, or perhaps into the void, no longer asks for help. It is the look of one who has surrendered, who has completed his descent.

To compare "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" with the cinema of Frederick Wiseman for its documentary approach to institutions or with that of the Dardenne brothers for the camera's stalking intimacy is apt, but reductive. Puiu’s film is a work unto itself, a unicum that manages to be both a precise sociological analysis and a universal allegory about loneliness, old age, and the fragility of human dignity. It is a film that hurts, that exhausts, that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. But it is a necessary malaise, the side effect of a work of art that does not merely entertain, but forces us to look where we would rather not, to confront the terrifying possibility that, on any given night, we could be Mr. Lăzărescu. And perhaps there will be no Mioara there to hold our hand.